Pipe Networks is providing dedicated fibre links for networks, bucking the trend towards bundling network connectivity with services. The Brisbane company says its method is cheaper than 100Mbps Ethernet. Dark fibre, a term often used to refer to unused network capacity, also describes dedicated fibre connections for large organisations — something Pipe needed for its own core business of internet exchanges
The federal Government’s second push to fully privatise Telstra has been quashed by the Senate
A German man who decapitated his mother with a Samurai sword after she told him to move out was convicted of murder Tuesday and sentenced to life in jail. He chopped off her head in the kitchen of their flat while she was reading a newspaper. They added he first planned to kill his father
Google’s Labs has cooked up two new search offerings, introducing a Personalised Web Search and Web Alerts, as part of the company’s plans to continue to heat up the market
Microsoft plans to introduce a news aggregation service for weblogs and to develop a social networking product
Lilly, the cute German kitten born with an extra set of non-working ears, has been adopted. According to the animal shelter in the foothills of the Alps where Lilly has been living, there was no shortage of people wanting to take her in once word spread about her unique trait.
We wanted to make sure the people were looking for a normal cat and not a gag to make an exhibition out of her,
Enrico Schlag, a worker at the Garmisch-Partenkirchen animal shelter told Reuters.
I’m a bit clueless about why the wee little fuzzy rodent creature is clutching a tiny automatic weapon, but it makes for an odd photograph.
I guess you make your fun where you can — via Charlie Stross
It’s not known whether the guys in Nigeria are money collectors or are just into the local equivalent of pet as penis replacement. Rather than following the American trend of pit bulls, they have opted for baboons and hyenas instead.
staying in south africa (i do), you get a lot of misconception about what goes on here. no there’s no wild animals roaming in the streets, but fuck — nigeria seems to be a different story. these images have triggered a curiosity in me that i want to satisfy. i want to go there and check it out for myself. yeah — and theres nothing exotic about the bottom feeders of nature. hyena’s hunt in packs and will rarely attack a live prey. the feed on carcasses lions leave behind.
This is actually bullshit. Hyenas are far more efficient hunters than lions and it is lions, due to their size, that often steal hyena kills. Hyenas are very cool animals and not to be fucked with.
If you’re using Microsoft Office and considering a switch to the free OpenOffice.org, Microsoft would like you to read their Open Office Competitive Guide first, in which they tell you how much better / faster / cheaper MS Office is than OpenOffice. Taran Rampepersad, an IT consultant in Trinidad, believes this Competitive Guide
is nothing but FUD, so he wrote a detailed rebuttal to it
Congress appears to be preparing assaults against peer-to-peer technology on multiple fronts. A draft bill recently circulated among members of the House judiciary committee would make it much easier for the Justice Department to pursue criminal prosecutions against file sharers by lowering the burden of proof and would also would seek penalties of fines and prison time of up to ten years for file sharing. They dubbed the bill Protecting Intellectual Rights Against Theft and Expropriation Act of 2004
, or the Pirate Act
Pet owners in the US city of Santa Fe, New Mexico, may soon be required to provide seat belts for pets if the city council approves new rules. Under the proposed regulations, animals travelling in the open beds of cars and trucks would have to be tethered
Development One Australia is shipping prebuilt mythtv-based PVRs. These are souped-up TiVo-like boxen built out of commodity hardware with all the features that I want, not just the ones that make the Luddites who run the movie studios comfortable
That’s what Picsel is promising… Picsel Browser runs on BREW V2.1 and beyond, and will allow users to display Flash, video, Microsoft Office, and even Adobe Acrobat files. And Picsel reckons the breakthrough will be for the benefit of network operators
GreyMagic Software has detected a serious security flaw in Yahoo’s Web e-mail service and Microsoft’s Hotmail service, which could allow hackers to run malicious scripts on users’ computers
Documentation of an insane office prank involving 2,500 Post-it notes and one mild-mannered victim.
Damon has been playing tricks on me for a few days now. So I came in on the weekend and did some
re-decoratingin his office. He didn’t see it until Monday morning when he came in and opened his office door.
His office blinds were closed, his door was shut and locked, and I left this post-it in the middle of his door. It says
Can you pick up some more post-its, we’re running low.
The pranksters notified Post-it manufacturers 3M, and received three cases of Post-it notes for future decorating
.
Another prankster opted for the use of those hideous Marshmallow Peeps. Lots and lots of Marshallow Peeps.
We did mail Just Born, manufacturers of Peeps, but sadly they never got back to us. The peeps wound up staying in the office for about two years, through at least two occupant changes. Even six months after they were up we had people coming by and eating them off the ceiling. Ugh.
Yet another office joker thought covering all available surfaces with eggs would be a hoot:
Brian still doesn’t budge.
There’s something you have to see,he says.
I walk over to my desk and see the following: Everyone in R&D is waiting to see my reaction. Unfortunately, I’m still in panic mode about being late. So, I run over to my desk. It is covered in eggs, complete with a live bird in a cage. After a beat, I say,
Huh.
Then I turn to Brian and say,
Okay, we gotta go.
Despite President Bush’s pledge that homosexuals ought to have the same rights
as all other people, his Administration this week ruled that homosexuals can now be fired from the federal workforce because of their sexual orientation
Jumping electric charges could waft breezes of ionised air through microchips, replacing the bulky, noisy fans that cool down today’s computers. Researchers at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana say their patent-pending technology could be built directly into a computer chip’s heat sink to provide a faster, quieter and lighter cooling system than the alternatives
The European Union on Wednesday issued its ruling in the long-running case against Microsoft, fining the American software giant US$613 million, the heaviest punishment in any European competition case to date. European Competition Commissioner Mario Monti ruled that Microsoft had failed to provide to rivals information that they needed to compete fairly in the market for server software and that the company has been offering Windows on the condition that it come bundled with Windows Media Player, stifling competition
The New Zealand government is about to define a small part of the rights assumed by the fair use
clause in the Copyright Act 1994. Essentially they are going to protect the consumers’ rights to convert media from one format to another for personal use, making it clearly legal to transfer tracks from a commercial CD to a mix-CD, MP3 player, PDA, PC, 8-track, or tuned array of hummingbirds. NZ law already makes it clear that gifting or reselling items includes a transfer all of rights, including copyright, warrantee, and licencing agreements, so providing your original is the genuine article you’re not a criminal
In the latest sign that a standards war is petering out, Toshiba has introduced dual-format DVD recordable drives. Toshiba’s Storage Device Division announced on Monday drives for notebook computers and desktop systems that support the -R/RW
and +R/RW
technologies. The so-called dash
and plus
formats have been at odds when it comes to DVD recording, but more and more manufacturers are building both technologies into their machines to make things simpler for consumers
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